Kindle's app and the Kindle tablet are a big revolution in the area of technology. Who could imagine the heavy books we carry around with us can just be converted into digital data and be easily carried around with us, without inviting shoulder and back pain!

Amazon’s Kindle was made even better when Amazon didn’t restrict the Kindle application to be used just on its own devices, they could be installed on any Android or iOS devices and made into a Kindle tablet. But with all of this technological advancement, our brains, at least mine, is pretty slow in accepting the drastic changes that occur in such a short span.

Even though Kindle and e-books have made our life easier in some ways, I still long for the smell of the new books bought fresh from the bookstore or online retailers and the use of paper bookmarks. Writing about bookmarks made me think about the situation of ten years back when handmade paper bookmarks were considered a very thoughtful gift. Now, most people give a blank look and try to figure out what it is.

Have you ever tried to hold a Samsung Galaxy tablet or iPad in your hand with Kindle installed in it and tried to read it lying down? I have. It falls on my face every time. Every time being the key word here! You need to read a paper book lying down? Easy! Most of us have been doing it for years now.

Kindle no doubt has its own set of advantages. If you find a word you don’t understand the meaning to, just search it in the built-in dictionary. No need to browse about a topic without leaving the device, just open the built-in Wikipedia app and read about it. These are some technical beauties which we won’t find in the paper books.

Many times when we are reading a book, a name or an idea comes up in the book which we can’t exactly remember what it was but we know that we read it before. How do you search it again? This particular task is much easier done in a physical book than an e-book. Browsing within a book is something that is seamless in a physical book. This is an idea which can be easily understood by people who read a hard-copy instead of an e-book.

Until now I was just discussing fiction and nonfiction books, specifically non-academic books. When it comes to academic books, which we use in school or University, I would rather choose the paper book to study any day, even if the Kindle version is cheaper (it almost always is). If I absolutely can’t find the paper version and a PDF version of it is available, I would go and print a paper version and then read it.

We need to write, make notes and annotations, and highlight content in these kind of books which theoretically is easily done in Kindle, but in reality is a very big pain. It takes a lot of time to do the same things in digital format than in the paper format. For a person like me who reads more academic books than others, Kindle hasn’t really been very helpful to me, until now at least.

Kindle has been one of the most amazing technological advancements in the recent times and has helped reduce the physical volume that is required to hold a large amount of books but if you are a kind of person who likes a humongous library at home or love to make handwritten notes on the white space in the books and scribbling, Kindle has some work to do to get to such a point where it matched the convenience of paper books.